The statements in this section may serve as a background to help understand the invention, but may not constitute prior art.
In the field of electronic commerce (e-commerce), there are interactive websites that assist Internet users in creating photo-based projects such as photobooks or albums, photo-calendars, photo-cards, and photo invitations. Such interactive websites allow internet users to upload photos, input text, and interact with the websites to create and order photo-based projects that are customized to user's preferences.
A common drawback with conventional photo-based project websites is the amount of time required by users (Internet users or customers) to create a photo-based project. Users must often participate in a variety of functions and processes in order to complete a photo-based project. For example, users usually must sort through the photos they desire to upload, remove the photos that are not adequate or properly focused, choose the photos to be uploaded, group photos together by topic or location, order the photos by chronological order, and crop or focus photos on the relevant portions of said photos. Furthermore, custom designing spreads and/or pages of a photobook, along with the design of a cover page (front and back hard covers) adds another complexity in a book creation project. An intelligent designing of pages and spreads in a photobook is a skill often not available to an average Internet user. Attempting to design a pleasant-looking photobook with all necessary processes can take undue time and labor.
Further, there are corrections and modifications that users must separately make on photos, pages, and spreads before the photos, pages, and spreads can be appropriately used in a photo-based project. For one example, users often would like to re-arrange or re-order photos, pages, and/or spreads once they preview a photobook, or other photo-project, but before ordering the project. Undue delays in editing a photo, page, or spread arrangement can create user frustration, increase inconvenience, and in general inconvenience and annoy users, and delay the purchasing process. Thus, conversion rates are reduced, and revenues to the photo project operator are reduced
For another example, users often must correctly orient photos (landscape or portrait view), perform color corrections on photos, remove red-eye from the eyes of photo subjects, and correct photos for brightness or contrast. All of the corrections and modifications mentioned above require that the users additionally open a second program or application in a user device such as a personal computer, choose the photos to be corrected or modified, perform corrections or modifications, and then save the modified photos before using them in the project. Again, performing the corrections and modifications mentioned above may require additional skills, and can be time consuming, labor intensive, and thus creating displeasure in the entire book creation process. As a result, many users that log-on to prior art photo-based project websites often discontinue the process, without completing a purchase transaction of the photo-book.
Therefore, there is a long-felt and unsolved need to make it easy and efficient for an Internet user to create, customize, and preview a photo-based project, before ordering, on an Internet capable device.
It is against this background that various embodiments of the present invention were developed.